Tuesday, 1 December 2009

Yayz the mail came all the way from Scotland

Franca at Oranges & Apples had a giveaway recently of varying prizes, and I won a runner up one, and she sent me a darling pattern to make!

I love the collar options, and I'm totally into straight skirts since my weekend's floral efforts!

Thank you darling for your parcel!

Today is a really wet dreary and cold day. You'd never have known it was boiling hot and 40 degrees on the weekend. So for the first day of summer it's pretty weird! We had fun at work today because it was the Opposition Party's turn to fuck things up, and they changed over leadership. LOLS a hoy for sure as we all watched tv together and joked. I have only a few days of work left for the year now, and I keep forgetting to get my leave form in, but I know it'll be approved. Next week I'm planning on sewing up a marathon, cause all I feel like doing now is making stuff from my stash. I've also been blog hopping and found a few interesting things like a neverending scarf to try (I'm a quarter of a way through), a cool sewing chick Zoe who wrote this blog piece for this sewing pattern place called Collette, and some of the patterns look pretty good! But darling design blog has THE best header over at Lipstick on Your Teeth. There are just too many good things on the internet!

But go and read Zoe's blog post on Makeshift ... it's really good! I hadn't heard of the Makeshift project yet, and as it's what I aspire to do 100 percent of the time (make and wear ALL my clothes even undies etc) but it sounds really cool, a mix of sustainable and a mix of new and reused. Zoe has a ponder of used fabrics etc, and buying new. I think about this a lot, because I like to make clothes for my friends to buy from me (they won't take freebies anymore, they all insist to pay me) and sometimes they ask for a navy cotton dress, and I only have a few scraps of navy left over from my op shop finds, and I know I can't really guarentee there will be navy cotton at the op shop on my next visit.... I tend to go to the Remnants Warehouse and buy new. But they are remnants of new things. So you can't buy a whole lotta fabric for big runs of a garment.

BUT, I really want to just make things from other things. Fabric from op shops mostly and found things. Then I think too much that I'm making these things new, and then on that consumer level that people have in their brains these things are new and then they get old and tiresome and then my things end up as landfill. Even though I rescued them from landfill in the first place (maybe).

I don't know! I do know that I like reusing as much as possible and I like seeing other blogs doing this too. Yay.

Hi!!! Oh, thanks so much for mentioning me and my little blog! Yeah, I think about sustainability ALL the time too. I think that if you have made a garment by hand, and the recipient knows that, then they are definately less likely to throw it out and it end up in the landfill. All we can do is encourage people to think a little more about what they buy and why so they are more likely to hang on to it for longer, and if they are commissioning you to make something, then they are definately thinking about their purchase rather than going to some cheap outlet and randomly buying some shoddy crap that will become misshapen after one wash. They are investing more themselves when they commission you to make them a dress. So if you need to buy new fabric some times, that's fine. After all, we need to support fabric shops too sometimes, otherwise even more will go out of business, and people will rely on mass-manufactured clothes even more and be even less inclined to take up home sewing as a hobby. Can you tell I've been thinking about these things a lot?! I think your upcycling and op shopping is a massive inspiration to everyone who reads your blog, it certainly has been for me. xxx

I'm always jealous of people who take a charity shop find that is ten sizes too large and make it into something fab because I never have the imagination to see what an ugly oversized garment could become, so good on you for being able to do it successfully!